MPEG has developed various technologies for multimedia transport, such as MPEG-2 Transport Stream (TS) and ISO Media Base File Format. These technologies have been widely accepted and heavily used by various industries and applications, such as digital broadcasting, audio and video transport over the Internet, mobile phones, etc.

In recent years, the Internet has become an important channel for delivery of multimedia. As the HTTP protocol is widely used on the Internet, it has recently been used extensively for the delivery of multimedia content. However, there is no standard for HTTP-based streaming of MPEG media. MPEG intends to standardize a solution that addresses this need.

The main objectives of this new standard are:

efficient delivery of MPEG media over HTTP in an adaptive, progressive, download/streaming fashion;

support of live streaming of multimedia content;

efficient and ease of use of existing content distribution infrastructure components such as CDNs, proxies, caches, NATs and firewalls;

support of integrated services with multiple components;

support for signaling, delivery, utilization of multiple content protection and rights management schemes; and

support for efficient content forwarding and relay.

Timeline of the calls and preliminary development plan:

Final call for proposals: 2010/04 - DONE

Ad-hoc Group meeting for editing the HTTP Streaming of MPEG Media Requirements document by improving applicability of requirement and making the document available by 2010/05/13. - DONE

Ad-hoc Group meeting for the evaluation of the received responses on Saturday and Sunday before 93rd MPEG meeting in Geneva (2010/07/24-25)

Adobes' Dynamic HTTP Streaming: according to their Web site, this will be available in late May 2010 (i.e., should be NOW!) and is based on their own FMF manifest and F4F file format. The former is an XML document describing the session and the latter MP4 fragment files, i.e., also based on ISO Base Media File Format.

Open IPTV Forum (OIPF): has been published on Sep 7th, 2010 including "HTTP Adaptive Streaming" which adopts 3GPP AHS and adds support for MPEG-2 Transport Stream.

Interestingly, all of them (except for Movstreaming for which I cannot confirm) utilize some kind of manifest file and extend the ISO Base Media File Format. The manifest file does not follow any (metadata) standard such as MPEG-7 or MPEG-21 which, I think, could be used for defining the manifest with probably some minor extensions. In any case, this manifest file looks like an interesting use case for the concept of the Digital Item introduced by MPEG-21. Furthermore, it seems there is a need to extend the ISO Base Media File Format in order to support HTTP (live) streaming. Note that MPEG is current defining an amendment for part 12 of MPEG-4 - the home of the ISO Base Media File format - which is called "AMENDMENT 2: Support for sub-track selection & switching, post-decoder requirements, and color information":-) Finally, I've recently seen a paper (presented at MMSys'10) on a Low Overhead Container Format for Adaptive Streaming that proposes an alternative to the MPEG family of file formats for adaptive HTTP streaming. I wonder whether this is worth to consider ...

Recently, the IETF has received a number of new drafts (i.e., see here and here) addressing issues related to HTTP streaming.

About Me

Christian Timmerer an associate professor in the Department of Information Technology (ITEC), Multimedia Communication Group (MMC), Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria. His research interests include the immersive multimedia communication, streaming, adaptation, and Quality of Experience. He was the general chair of WIAMIS 2008 and QoMEX 2013 and has participated in several EC-funded projects, notably DANAE, ENTHRONE, P2P-Next, ALICANTE, SocialSensor, and COST IC1003 QUALINET. He also participated in ISO/MPEG work for several years, notably in the area of MPEG-21, MPEG-M, MPEG-V, and MPEG-DASH. He received his PhD in 2006 from the Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt. Publications under http://multimediacommunication.blogspot.co.at/p/publications.html, follow him on http://www.twitter.com/timse7, and subscribe to his blog http://blog.timmerer.com. In 2012 he cofounded bitmovin.com to provide professional services around MPEG-DASH.